Relief
THE HAUNT PROJECT IS PRESENTED IN PARTNERSHIP WITH WRITERS SA, AND IS SUPPORTED BY ARTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA.
fiction by Glenn Diaz
Our SUV lumbered across the muddy field to the shack dwarfed by still, postcard mountains.
Is that it? Mercedes asked, a lilt of unusual worry in her voice.
Yes, ma’am, said our guide, the barangay captain. One of our beneficiaries lives here.
Tay? the barangay captain called out, leaning in through the open doorframe moments later. Inside, a man was picking himself up from a bamboo bed. Dark sagging skin glistening with sweat. He had nothing on except an old pair of jeans that looked too big for his shrunken waist. I stepped inside with Teresa, assaulted by the hot air trapped between the plywood walls. Mercedes took one look and went back to the van.
Good morning, Teresa said. No-nonsense as usual.
Magandang umaga po tatay, I translated for her in Tagalog.
How are you, tatay? asked the barangay captain in Waray, the local language. We have guests here who want to talk to you.
Intruders more like, I thought, looking at Teresa, who smiled at me as if she’d heard.
The man grunted. His face was downtrodden, with the quiet pain that we had grown too familiar with over the past week. He blinked in slow appraisal of his surroundings, foremost perhaps the blonde bespectacled lady uncomfortably perched on the plastic table next to his bed, the only other fixture in the hovel aside from a cook stove on the dirt floor.
Teresa, the blonde lady, opened her notebook and took out her pen. Thank you for talking to us, she told the man. A moment passed. She looked at me, smiled.
Sorry, I whispered. Salamat po sa pakikipag-usap ninyo sa amin, tatay, I told the man. Instantly I was aware of just how tedious my translation was, how overly long and formal. As usual, I injected what I hoped was a note of apology in my voice, to make up for Teresa’s usual no-nonsense approach.
The man shifted wordlessly on the bed for a few moments; the barangay captain soon came to our rescue and translated my Tagalog—Teresa’s English—to Waray. The tiny preamble became even more cumbersome, now twice removed from the original.
As if on cue the man realised what was happening, and out it came. He went on for a while, every now and then wildly gesturing. In the sea of unintelligible anguish, I caught certain key words—Yolanda, bagyo, delubyo, relief goods, ten thousand, katapusan. The narrative was familiar in the seaside town: the singular terror when Haiyan’s apocalyptic winds arrived at dawn, how it howled like a frightened child, vibrated against eardrums. Then the rain of falling coconuts as they made their escape across the soaked fields, the screams at the school-turned-evacuation-centre when the first galvanised iron sheet flew off overhead, exposing them to the nonstop downpour. The certainty that it was the end. Katapusan na. When he was done, he rested his hands on his stomach, which I noticed was bloated. I recalled the tiny stream of water outside his house, no doubt teeming with parasitic worms.
It’s the same story, I told Teresa. They were very scared when Yolanda came. Scary winds. They didn’t feel safe at the evacuation centre. They thought it was the end.
That’s it? she asked.
I nodded.
Sounded a lot longer than that. Anyway, is there a wife? she asked the barangay captain, who turned to ask the man.
Oh, the man grimaced in pain, then, while talking, began to angrily swing his hands again, before pointing to his engorged leg.
The wife left after he got paralysed, the barangay captain said.
How awful, Teresa said, opening her notebook to write something down. I wondered what her shorthand for schistosomiasis was but knowing her she probably wrote the word every single time.
I can’t even work anymore, the man went on, fixated at Teresa’s vigorous note-taking. I have three children but all of them have their own lives, their own families to feed. One is in Manila, one in Cebu, one in Dubai. One angry swing for every perceived betrayal.
Teresa shook her head. Absolutely dreadful, she said. Then she stood up and, blinking the concern away, extended a hand to the man. I think that’s all we need, sir, thank you. We can’t really promise anything right now, but hopefully more help is coming.
Una na po kami, tatay, I told him, also shaking the unmoving hand.
Stepping out of the house, I hopped over the stream of water as Teresa fished out her digital camera. When we turned to look back, the man was standing feebly by the door of his shack, propped up by the makeshift wooden crutch that he had retrieved from under his bed. Oh, look at that, Teresa said, snapping away, and I thought he was paralysed! To the man, she called out, waving, Very sprightly, sir, thank you. The man, with some effort, waved back.
None of us, I noticed, gave the shack a parting look as our SUV tried to manoeuvre back to the muddy road. Mercedes passed around a pack of wet wipes. Everyone took a piece except the barangay captain in the passenger seat, staring off into the middle distance.
Teresa shook her head. No running water, no electricity. Anyway, it’s looking like the cash aid was consistently beneficial across the board, but it was most helpful to those who already have the capacity to help themselves. Otherwise—
Is that your executive summary? Mercedes asked.
We laughed. They proceeded to rehearse the kind of talk on beneficiary selection criteria and aid modalities and reporting matrices that began the minute Teresa emerged from Ninoy Aquino’s Terminal 3 a week earlier. To be fair I also looked forward to reading her report, with the narrative flourish that she was known for and was rare in technical documents.
Out of our sight, the poor man’s life continued. This much I assumed.
Hey, that was the last one! Mercedes said during a lull in the conversation. I gave her a half-hearted high five, which Teresa regarded with vague amusement. And we have a free day before our flight on Sunday! I felt something decompress in my chest, already daydreaming about tomorrow. The market in the morning to buy pasalubong. Then a café for some reading. A nice local boy for some drinks and something fun and quick. So when Teresa said one of the receptionists told her about a lovely Spanish-era house a bit farther afield and wouldn’t it be a nice side trip to cap off a productive week, I looked at Mercedes for help. I caught her frown softening into a smile. I’m sure Andrew would love to join you, she told Teresa. I myself need to catch up on work unfortunately. I shrugged, smiled. Mercedes beamed. You guys have fun!
✷
On the second day of the interviews, Teresa pulled me aside and said she had formulated her questions in a very specific, very studied way and so it was crucial that I capture them as much as possible. She’d been opening her interviews by explaining to the respondents that she had flown in from Sydney to quote evaluate our organization’s Haiyan programme, and she noticed that I’d ask them, simply, Kumusta na raw ho kayo? How are you all doing? Far from an exact translation, but to my mind it facilitated things, evident when, for instance, the respondents without fail answered, OK lang.
Just fine.
The people were always OK lang somehow.
OK, I told her.
The foreign aid workers I talked to were indeed struck by how quickly Filipinos managed to regain some normalcy in their lives after Yolanda. Unlike Haiti, they said. Unlike Banda Aceh. Even in the immediate aftermath, amid reports of looting downtown, when debris and mud-encrusted corpses still littered the pitch-dark streets, and people milled about with a dazed look on their faces, the aid workers were surprised at some of the things they saw. Boys playing basketball with a half-ruined board amid debris, girls jamming to Korean pop songs with a salvaged guitar, mothers gossiping into the wee hours of the morning.
I imagined it must have been a strange time for the locals. An army of earnest, hapless foreigners unleashed into their midst, Americans and Brits and Aussies and, rumour had it, harried-looking Taiwanese evangelists who gave away damp bundles of thousand-peso bills, no questions asked. At night, the few restaurants in the downtown area that managed to reopen crawled with them, trading stories of despair and perseverance, relief distribution strategies and contacts for vehicle rentals. For the locals, inundated with aid and, later, an accounting of the aid, it was a bizarre new world. Landscape peppered with the multi-coloured emblems of relief agencies, in tarps and roofs and cement bags. Words like FGD and cash-for-work suddenly in their everyday vocabulary. So they said shelter instead of house, livelihood instead of jobs. So they knew what WASH stood for because of the UNICEF guys and could tell UN agencies by their logos.
But if the early days of the program had been a logistics nightmare of getting food packs and blankets and people to ground zero, one year later today, with the transitional shelters built, the livelihood classes on food processing and seaweed farming done, and the dead long buried in mass graves, aid workers had come to dread an entirely new demon: evaluation. Teresa Hanley was the first in what we were told would be a battalion of evaluators for our organisation, on a quest to determine if the hundreds of millions that poured in (half a billion dollars, per government figures) were being put to good use. She was sympathetic to our plight, she had assured us.
I abhor evaluations, she had said at the inception meeting via Skype. A theatrical shudder. Then weeks later, in a candid moment of exhaustion after visiting the last of the six remote barangays for the day, I put it out there that the money being spent on this evaluation could have built another house or two, the foundations of a sturdier evacuation centre, half a dozen fishing boats. She laughed heartily, then went on about the long-term benefits of a thorough audit. It helps identify gaps in implementation, she said, document best practices for potential mainstreaming. Things you don’t immediately see, she looked at me, but are beneficial in the grand scheme of things as long as one was patient.
OK, I told her, and changed the subject.
✷
You know, I never understood this drought everyone’s been talking about, Teresa said. That looks pretty lush to me, wouldn’t you say?
I nodded, made a show of looking at the blur of half-bent coconut trees and ill-tended fields outside. The small-talk plodded. I was tired. I knew that I needed to volley back, but my English, flailing after five days, stayed in my throat like fishbone.
In the lull, she asked about my life.
I told her my capsule story, short enough to recite in one breath: journalism undergrad, a few years doing research for a broadsheet, desire to do more so went to development work.
It also paid better, needless to say.
Teresa’s face was vacant, without the patronising twist of the mouth with which this proud report was often received.
I love Spanish colonial architecture, she told me.
A side of me respected her buoyant disorientation.
This might in fact be fun. We’d been to the usual tourist places, Imelda’s mansion, San Juanico Bridge, the monument of MacArthur wading ashore and the short Filipino dignitary half-submerged in stale water. Problem was, her source wasn’t exactly clear where the fabled house was so we needed to scour a couple of towns where the ancestral homes hadn’t been bulldozed for a new gas station or Western Union. It would be worth it, she said, if the house was half as lovely as it was in the photos.
We found no such house in the first town.
En route to the second, we had just passed by the welcome arch when it started to rain. I felt something lurch in my stomach, some form of vicarious trauma maybe after hearing countless stories of apocalyptic rains that began as a light drizzle. A makeshift sign said that the bridge was under repair. I checked my watch—half past three, and our hotel was two hours away. I said a quiet goodbye to my free day. We turned right to a rock-strewn path that curved around 45 degrees downhill to the shallow river above which the bridge stood. We held on our seats. We could see children playing in the ankle-deep water of the sluggish brook, idly watching passing vehicles. There were a number of vehicles ahead of us, including a multicab that was struggling on the uphill path back to the main road, making erratic, unsure heaves forward. Now that doesn’t look very safe, does it? Teresa said.
I cleared my throat.
This town, while not as known for old houses, had a few spread over a couple of streets. It was also one of the worst hit by Yolanda.
We stopped by a big bakery at the poblacion to ask for directions from a man taking shelter under the tarpaulin awning. The man scratched his head and relayed the question to the old lady behind the glass cases of bread and pastries. She pointed to her right; I thought I heard baybay.
I think she’s saying it’s by the sea, I told Teresa.
Oh, you don’t have to work today, she said. She turned to our driver. Any joy, Resty?
It’s near the beach, ma’am, Resty said.
Our vehicle weaved through narrow streets, deserted because of the rain except for children playing and a pedicab or two. On either side a parade of roofless structures, walls still caked with mud, tree trunks brown and leafless. Teresa and I each took one side of the road to watch. Every now and then, an old rundown house would emerge from the row of newly built structures and ongoing construction, not unlike the scene in my 10-minute walk from the train station to where I lived.
I turned to Teresa, suddenly grateful for her presence, for this job. I feel like I should tell you since we’re done anyway. There were some moments in the last five days when I would just zone out and I would look at you and have no idea what you just said. I apologise.
Oh, no, don’t be silly, she cried. You’ve done a good job as far as I could tell. No, no, Andrew, don’t think about it.
I didn’t expect translating to be so exhausting, I said.
No, I can imagine. You know, occupying two worlds at the same time. Don’t worry about it. She gave me a pat on the shoulder. And if you find yourself in Sydney, you’ve got a place to stay.
Is this it? Resty asked, slowing down. The rain had stopped, and in the freshly cleared air, the two-storey house stood indeed like a beautiful, if untidy, child.
Oh my God, Teresa said, getting off. We crossed the street to the row of storefronts in front of the house. The wind smelled vaguely of the sea.
It was apparently known in the area as balay nga gawas it harigi—literally, the house with the pillars outside. Teresa and I nodded in reverence. Like the well-preserved Spanish colonial houses in Vigan and Pagsanjan up north, the first storey was concrete, probably adobe—this one converted into a day care centre—and the second was made of wood. The famous pillars looked shabby and old, but it was impossible to miss the ornate design of the topmost sections that connected them to the equally elaborate wooden panels lining the roof. The capiz windows on the sea-facing side of the house had been replaced by GI sheets, which protruded like gangly teeth over the elaborate wrought-iron inlay at the base of the windows. Wooden beams jutted out from the bare roof.
Didn’t I tell you? Teresa said, letting out a sigh.
It’s beautiful, I agreed.
She waved to a little boy who had been looking at her askance. An officious-looking man came up to her and asked where she was from. While they talked, I looked up and saw dark clouds slowly assembling overheard. I looked at Resty and told Teresa we should start heading back soon. She waved goodbye to the man. She smiled. Everyone’s so nice here.
Let me just take one more photo, is that all right? she asked. I stepped back to give her a full view. In the distance, I could see the deserted town market. I tried to imagine the place bustling with commerce and activity, until thunder grumbled above and, from the sea, the sound of waves crashing on the seawall hauled me back. Storm surges, dead bodies. Let’s go? I called out to Teresa, to which, still smiling, she nodded.
✷
When the standstill of vehicles on the road hit the one-hour mark, Resty emerged from his catatonia behind the wheel and mumbled something. What was that, Res? I called out. There’s another route, he said, that went inland through San Miguel and could take us back to the city in three hours, give or take. Or we can wait for the rain to stop, which could take all night, but it’s up to you.
I was checking my phone for messages when I felt something poke my arm.
I’m wondering what button to press to get a translation of what Resty just said, Teresa said.
Sorry, I said. Remember the damaged bridge earlier? The river had risen from the rain so no vehicle could pass.
Around us, several private cars were trying to move out of the gridlock, only to be caught against the counter-flowing vehicles that had ganged up the other lane. A flurry of honks issued from behind. If I closed my eyes for a bit I was certain I was going to wake up aboard a bus in the middle of EDSA, on my way home after another long day at the office.
You hungry, Res? I asked Resty in Tagalog. He shook his head. Let’s hope this doesn’t become like that trip to Lingayen last month, remember that? That was also a damaged bridge, no?
He nodded. By the time we got to Jollibee, he said, Mercedes was shaking in hunger. Pushed her way to the front of the line.
I laughed.
Teresa checked her watch and looked outside. People’s patience baffles me sometimes, she said.
Sorry? I asked.
Filipinos are way too patient.
She sounded tired, defeated. We sat in silence; my eyes were weighed down by the lulling patter of the rain overhead.
My husband and I are going to Argentina next month for my 50th, she said. Took us a long time to pin down a place, but I think Argentina’s perfect. They have a bit of everything in there. Glaciers, canyons, deserts, falls, beaches. Arts, culture, architecture—
You really liked the old house we went to earlier, no? I really hope the owners will try to restore it to its pre-Yolanda state.
I don’t know. There’s something about that, she hummed, in search of a word, that imperfection.
What do you mean?
Have you been to Calcutta? (I shook my head.) Oh, gorgeous crumbling city. You have these majestic buildings, right? Absolutely grandiose and stately, opulent colonial architecture. And they’re run-down and grimy. Utterly derelict. On the brink of disintegration, almost. It’s beautiful.
The image of a tiny wooden shack in the middle of a field being battered by endless rain flashed in my head. Endless rain courtesy of the strongest typhoon in all of recorded history.
Did the rain at least bring relief from the oppressive heat?
I really wish we gave that man yesterday something, I told Teresa. Nothing big, like maybe five hundred pesos, good for a week or so.
She blinked. The last respondent? Yeah, no, I feel you. I know it’s tempting, but we shouldn’t, really. It would create false expectations and when another party comes it’ll cause them problems.
A bag of groceries and ask the captain to ration it? He wouldn’t know it came from us.
Oh, Andrew, she said. You’re new to this, aren’t you? What a sweetheart. You know, sometimes you just have to walk away even if it’s bad and hope that a more long-term solution is forthcoming.
Ano raw sabi, Resty? I called out.
He chuckled, tiny conspiracy.
I thought about the man. We really left him, just like that, tucking his suffering in a remote corner of our brains.
A knot in the traffic was untangled somewhere, and we moved about ten metres forward. Either the plunging side road by the bridge had been cleared or more vehicles had extricated themselves from the traffic and decided to turn around. The pitch black outside would be broken by passing yellow lights. Then we stopped again, the brake more forceful than usual, the blast from the air-conditioning even colder, forbidding respite.
✷✷✷
Glenn Diaz’s first book The Quiet Ones (2017) won the Philippine National Book Award. His second novel Yñiga was shortlisted for the 2020 Novel Prize. He holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Adelaide and teaches literature at the Ateneo de Manila University.
